add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> The default MTA line in inn.conf is:

>   mta: "@SENDMAIL@ -oi -oem %s"

> -oi or -i
> ignore dots alone on lines by themselves in incoming messages.  If this
> options is not specified, a line consisting of a single dot shall
> terminate the input.

> -oem or -em
> mail errors back to the sender. (default)


> nnrpd will just run sendmail -oi -oem <moderator-address> with the
> following message:

>   To: <moderator-address>
>   <article headers & body>


> We're not using the -f option to explicitly set an envelope sender
> address.  It seems that sendmail uses the contents of the From header
> field by default.  The envelope sender may then be invalid for articles
> posted with an invalid From header field, and bounces won't then be routed
> anywhere.

> (innmail does not use -f either.)

Oh, huh!  That actually surprises me quite a bit, and makes me rethink
parts of this discussion, since apparently we've been sending mail to
moderated groups this way for a while.

> Should something be improved there? (explicitly setting -f <newsmaster>
> may astonish newsmasters who will receive bounces for which they cannot
> do anything)

Yes, indeed.  Although I do suspect that would result in better
deliverability of moderated group submissions.

> Couldn't a moderators.method file be published in ftp.isc.org (along
> with active and newsgroups) to centralize that?

I guess... I'm not sure I really want to volunteer Todd and I for more
work on that front, but at the same time it probably wouldn't be too much
work.

Some sort of centralized database like that is presumably the solution,
though, whether at ISC or on GitHub or somewhere else like that.  Not
eyrie.org, though; there's too much Usenet stuff that depends on me
personally already.  :)

> We could also use ":" as a separator instead of whitespace.  It would then
> be consistent with the existing moderators file which defines the address
> to send the mails.

> Re-using the existing moderators file (adding for instance a third field)
> sounds a bit disruptive, but could.  It would mean lines like:

> comp.*:%s at moderators.isc.org:news-transmission,mail

I think you want to keep the submission wildcard address independent of
the transmission method since I don't think those two things will be very
correlated, which means you'll just end up with a combinatorical
explosion.

(Ideally we would publish the submission addresses of all moderated
groups, but last time we asked the moderators were pretty strongly against
that on the grounds that they'd get spammed.  Which, well, is probably
true; even though it's trivially possible to construct a working email
address for every moderated group already, it doesn't get picked up by web
scraping, so most spammers probably don't bother.)

> When several moderated groups are present in the Newsgroups header
> field, the moderator of the leftmost moderated newsgroup (the one who
> received the mail for approval) will have to ensure that he forwards the
> message in a format that the next moderator can cope with.  It may
> indeed differ.

Yeah, that's a weird wrinkle, but also multiple moderated groups mostly
just doesn't work and hasn't ever really worked.  There's a protocol and
everything for how to handle them, but my guess is that the number of
people who follow that protocol are approximately zero.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.